How a robust infrastructure plan can reboot the Trump agenda

The cliché about presidential budgets sent to Congress is that they are "dead on arrival." In the case of the budget crafted by Trump's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), one might say that it was dead even before it was written, and it was none other than candidate Donald Trump who killed it.

The administration's budget that was sent to lawmakers on the Hill in mid-May seems to reflect the priorities of Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, a founding member of the Congressional Freedom Caucus, much more closely than it reflects the priorities of candidate Trump. While on the trail, Trump argued that the fiscally austere approach of budget proposals emanating from the House that went after entitlement spending were politically suicidal. He hinted that the GOP should wait on Obamacare repeal until the ACA collapsed under its own unsustainable structure, and that the federal government should take advantage of low interest rates to invest massively in much-needed infrastructure renewal that will pay off in spades by spurring job creation and economic growth.

All of this went directly against the Republican Party orthodoxy of an austerity-based approach of balancing the budget through controversial cuts in popular programs in the short term and skimping on national investments that would pay off in the medium to long term with higher rates of economic growth and increased revenue to the Treasury.

Trump's agenda also deftly avoided the disastrous "takers vs. givers" narrative reflected in Mitt Romney's notorious characterization of half of the American electorate as leaches who would never vote Republican because they pay no federal income tax. For many working Americans with stagnant or declining wages and an increasing payroll tax burden, the notion that they were the problem was received as a slap in the face from an out-of-touch GOP elite—and rightly so. Those very same disaffected voters supported Donald Trump in droves, precisely because of his message of Making American Great Again with a return of jobs and economic dynamism.

That may explain why the president himself has not weighed in on the details of the budget sent to the Hill. The budget is full of items certain to embroil the administration in needless high-profile battles with Congress such as cuts to public broadcasting, the USDA, the National Institutes of Health, and cuts in Medicaid spending that go farther than the already-contentious cuts in the House-passed American Health Care Act (which candidate Trump included in the off-limits category of entitlement spending). These measures represent an effort to get to a balanced budget within a ten-year window.